


It's Not the End of the World

by cthulhuraejepsen



Category: Parahumans Series - Wildbow
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-17
Updated: 2018-01-25
Packaged: 2019-03-05 21:24:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,022
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13396527
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cthulhuraejepsen/pseuds/cthulhuraejepsen
Summary: A series of vignettes set in an apartment complex on Earth Gimel, mostly to get some junk about Ward out of my brain. Assume that this is spoiler scoped up to the current chapter of Ward, as I'll probably be adding to it as the serial progresses. Might have some dread continuity to it, if I go long enough.





	1. Chapter 1

April wouldn’t have ever told anyone this, but her power felt like stabbing a knife into the dark. The “in the dark” part was easy to figure out, because she didn’t always have a sense of where she should be aiming her power, but the “stabbing” part was a little more abstract. When her power hit someone, it didn’t feel like she had stabbed them, it felt more like pushing her metaphorical fist into a pie and spreading out her fingers. Maybe it was the notional motion, a thrusting one, that brought that imagery to mind. She was still trying to figure out a way to make the metaphors palatable, both the stabbing part of trying to find someone to enter, and the spreading of the fingers in a warm pie, neither of which sounded like the kind of thing you’d want to say in an interview, or even in casual conversation.

To call the place she was staying an apartment was overly generous. The apartment complex was made up of two grids of apartments, placed upright, side-by-side, and joined by the hallways and stairwells that ran through the center, with no elevators to speak of, even though the top apartments were seven floors up. What April thought had probably happened was that the original design had called for the hallways to be shorter than apartments were long, making the complex look like a rectangle from overhead, with two bits taken out of the sides, but then someone had realized that they could shift things over and put in some floor in order to get some more floorspace at minimal extra cost, even if it resulted in an apartment that bordered on being too small for a person to live in. The complex had seven of those, one for each floor, each with a door at the very end of the hallway, and the one on the seventh floor was April’s.

She loved it. She had always been drawn to the small and cozy, always wanted to be one of the dolls in the little dollhouse that her father had made for her. She had moved up to the attic as soon as her father had let her, a place with low ceilings that she could curl up into. Back when she’d been a more active reader, she had loved reading about orphans or stepchildren confined to cramped quarters, more than she had liked reading about their exploits. She had always envied the Boxcar Children their boxcar, and her attic bookshelf was filled with cozy little stories of very small people who could live in an empty soup can with a pin cushion for a bed and a cotton ball for a pillow.

That life was gone now, the dollhouse, the attic, and the books, all of it completely destroyed and an Earth away, but April had her small, cozy apartment to replace it.

The best part was that she didn’t have to share it with anyone, and that meant that she was free to do whatever she wanted, including using her power. She’d made marks on her walls with names and brief biographies, written on pieces of paper taken from her journal so that she could grab them all and slot them into place. Because there was little else to do on a Saturday, she sat in her bed, looked over at the marks until she found Knuckles, then stabbed out into the dark, hoping to find him.

She felt herself make contact and all other sensation leave her as she focused on that one bright point, the totality of the sensation of another person, which she spread into as quick and easily as putting on a t-shirt.

It was always confusing at first, to be in someone else’s body. The first part of it was that she didn’t have control, only the senses, and the feeling of being jerked around like a puppet by the movements of someone else still took some adjusting, even after two whole months of near-constant practice.

The other half of it was in the sensations themselves. People tuned out  _ so much _ about themselves and the world they were perceiving, until it was just sort of synthesized into this knowledge about the world. April had always been fascinated by the smells of other people’s homes, but of course her  _ own _ home didn’t smell like anything, and the reason for that was, as far as she’d been able to find out, your nose eventually just got tired of telling you about a smell. It was the same with the taste of your own mouth, or the feeling of your heart beating in your chest, or the whistle of wind through your nostrils as you breathed, or a slight ache in your hip, or a million other things that people just sort of spaced out on until someone called attention to it. For April, being in someone else’s body meant feeling all of that, at full blast, as long as she was in them. It wasn’t intrinsically bad, and April suspected that her power was helping her out a little bit to make it not bad, but it still required some adjusting to, and probably always would.

She was bad with names, and sometimes it took a while for people to say their names, so she’d given them nicknames that she could remember. Rough-Knuckles (or Knuckles for short) was Kyle, a heavyset boy of maybe seventeen or eighteen, her age. She could instantly feel the way that his skin folded where his gut hung down just a bit, and the slightly uncomfortable position that he was in on the chair that they’d brought up from salvage. She could feel a little bit of sweat on the back of his neck and a slight strain in his hands where he held a controller that was pushing buttons. They must have been playing games for a while, because his eyes were a little bit dry, and he was blinking too often, and all of that was probably lost on him, but it didn’t make his body a comfortable one to be in, especially since he had the same dry, calloused knuckles that she’d given him a nickname for, which always seemed to be scraping against each other whenever he moved his fingers. He was never her favorite, and watching him play games with Swamp-ass didn’t really appeal to her, but he gave her eyes on Hairless, who was sitting at the kitchen (a word used loosely here to mean a place with linoleum floors, a hot plate, and a sink). As soon as she had her bearings, she stabbed out sideways toward him.

Hair was really noticeable, if your brain wasn’t editing out the sensation of it. When she was in someone with hairy legs, she felt it pushing away the fabric of their clothes, collecting drops of sweat, or being pushed against the direction of growth. That was without even going into the way that hair sat on the head, or touched the neck, or hung down just within view of peripheral vision, all of which weren’t annoying per se, or but were definitely noticeable to April. Hairless, the teenage boy next door, wasn’t actually hairless, but he had a lot less hair than the others, almost none on his legs and arms, none on his chest or back, and his head was shaved. He was fastidious, or at least as much as a person could be after the end of the world, which made being in his body a little better than in anyone else’s.

“I just don’t think that’s the future,” said Hairless, gesturing toward the small TV, pitching his voice a little louder over the sound of the box fan in the window and the tappity-tap of buttons being pressed in rapid succession on two different controllers. April heard everything, naturally, all the little things that people grew accustomed to and ignored, and she felt the vibrations of Hairless’ voice in his bones as he spoke, along with the wet sensation of his throat, lips, and tongue rapidly shifting position to allow him to speak.

“Obviously not the future,” said Rough-Knuckles, staring at the screen.

“You know what I mean,” said Hairless with a sigh. April looked at the screen with him, where the splitscreen showed two men with guns, split-screen, moving through an Old West town.

“It checks the boxes,” said Swamp-Ass, “Not this, because I don’t think the guns have appeal, but it’s in the frontier, pre-cape, escapism, possibility, adventure.”

“It hits the zeitgeist too closely,” said Hairless. “It’s parallel, but the NBT isn’t going to be a parallel, it’s going to be perpendicular.” NBT was an acronym that they used often, Next Big Thing. “We’re looking for something that’s reactionary.”

Knuckles threw his controller to the side and watched his on-screen character die to the black-hat enemies. “It’s a reactionary framing,” he replied. “Take the new and say that it’s old, take the bad and say that it’s good, it’s what half the people are doing, it’s a wave to be ridden. You’re still stuck on the pastoral.”

“Not literally pastoral,” said Hairless. “Too many people are finding out the hard way that farming isn’t easy, you don’t want to have them shaking their heads.”

“Too many people are finding their  _ lives _ not easy,” replied Knuckles. “If you go for the non-fantastical you’re going to run into that problem anyway, where people look at an atelier or whatever and frown to themselves because it breaks SOD.”

“Escapism is allowed to break SOD,” said Swamp-Ass, frowning. April hated how he frowned, the way he drove his upper teeth into his bottom lips. You couldn’t see it, really, but she didn’t like the feeling of it. It was her second least favorite thing about being in his body.

“In specific ways,” answered Knuckles. He was leaning back in the salvaged chair, looking up at the ceiling, where there was water damage even though the apartment complex was only a few months old.

“You mean a big-ask?” asked Hairless.

“That,” said Knuckles, “But the fake world also has to conform to how the world actually is, at least as people understand the real world, and what makes our position tricky is that the end of the world changed all that, and changed it differently for different people. People don’t like capes, they don’t trust authority, so you can’t just say that an authority is good, because they won’t buy it, you pick a small town where everyone knows each other for our setting and who’s the policeman, who’s the mayor?”

“You’re taking it too far,” said Hairless. “Besides, if we go Old West, who is the authority?”

“Main character,” replied Swamp-Ass. “He’s a man whose authority is his sidearm and the skill he uses to wield it, respected because of his deeds rather than his station.”

“Ugh,” said Hairless. “You arm a guy with a gun, it just reminds people how powerless they actually are in the real world, where carrying a gun gets you killed.”

“Do you really want to write something where there’s no antagonist?” asked Knuckles.

“I want non-human antagonists,” said Hairless. “That’s where we’re at on Gimel, right? Us against the elements, trying to make food, trying to get through the winters, dealing with all sorts of garbage like that. I legitimately do want a story where the big struggle is trying to round up the sheep and get them back in their pen, and I think that kind of thing might serve people as a kind of escape.”

April pulled out of his body, and back into her own, giving Hairless the last word. She  _ liked _ the boys in 7B, but they had been going around on this topic for the better part of a week, trying to figure out the next big thing. At first it had been exciting, but now she felt the urge to go over and knock on their door to tell them that they should just start creating something. She never actually would do that, for fear of having to talk to someone, which she thought would only be worse if it were someone whose senses she had shared, but she thought about it, from time to time.

April looked over the people marked on her walls again, looking for something different. The 7B boys were a little bit too forceful in their conversation for her current mood, and a little bit too sedentary. April was, frankly, feeling restless, so she turned to toward where Silky was marked and projected forward, slipping her knife out into the dark once again.


	2. Chapter 2

Silky normally took impeccable care of herself, so April found herself disappointed to feel three or four days of hair growth on her legs. It was slightly itchy and slightly uncomfortable, and April knew that the sensation would last for as long as she remained with her sensorium (a word she had found in her searching at the library, which meant the sensory apparatus as considered as a whole) spread out into Silky’s body. The leg hair was April’s only complaint though; Silky had silky hair, which is why April had given her that nickname. She loved the sensation of it cascading down her back.

“And what kind of expedition would it bed?” asked another girl’s voice, speaking from across the room. Silky didn’t have eyes on her, which meant that April didn’t have eyes on her. April willed Silky to turn and face the person who had spoken, but she had the sensorium, not the motorium, or whatever you would call it.

“Same thing I got my degree in, oh so long ago,” said Silky. “Comparative linguistics. We’re going to go talk to the Gimelites.” She was at the little breakfast bar that some of the apartment dwellers used as their primary eating space, using the edge of a fork to cut into a microwaved strudel. She was trying her best to make all the squares the same size, but it was difficult work with a fork.

“I thought they did that two years ago,” replied the other voice, quick enough to seem curt, her tone dismissive.

“They’re not a monolith,” replied Silky, still focused on her strudel. “Earliest estimates are that there are a few hundred indigenous languages.” She paused, and April was keenly aware of that pause, when the only sounds were of breathing, beating hearts, and distant noises from the rest of the apartment complex. “I know what you’re thinking, but there is a stipend.”

“It’s a dead end,” came the reply, and April felt Silky clutch her fork, fingers straining.

“You’d think, given the end of the world, that maybe people would be more inclined to do the things that they wanted to do, rather than the things that are absolutely compelled of them,” replied Silky, her voice level but her muscles tense.

“I would think  _ exactly the opposite, _ actually,” said the voice behind her. Listening closer April thought that they were probably the same age, or maybe related, though it was hard to tell. The voice of the person she was inhabiting was always a little bit weird, which April thought was probably due to bone conduction. “I’d think that given everything that we’ve all been through, putting dreams and aspirations on hold in favor of survival would be the default state for humanity.”

“Really?” asked Silky, still not looking behind her, using the fork a little more aggressively. “I’m betting that a lot of people on Earth Bet were just in a holding pattern, taking a boring commute to their boring job, working to increase shareholder value, consuming their boring media that they’d forget about when the twenty-two minutes of what might questionably be called content, mixed with eight minutes of commercials--” She paused, having gotten the strudel into twelve almost exactly equal pieces. She started stabbing them with her fork, loading it up. “I would think that people would think to themselves that hey, this is the wake up call, maybe I shouldn’t be living my life as a cog in the machine anymore, maybe that wasn’t a fulfilling existence, maybe you don’t get that many chances to start over.”

“Is that what you think?” asked the voice behind her, sounding hollow. “That the deaths of billions had a silver lining, because you could stop having such a boring commute?”

Silky finally turned around, fork loaded with four pieces of strudel. April took in the other woman, who was close to Silky’s age, and had the same features that April had occasionally seen on Silky, usually in the mirror, only occasionally through the eyes of others. Long, straight, black hair, slightly wide nostrils, skin that was a dark brown, full lips, and expressive eyebrows. Silky hardly ever wore makeup, but this other woman wore a fair amount, which said something about her, in days like these.

“I’m tired of everyone making me feel like I should be a sobbing wreck,” said Silky. “People died. Lots of them. Okay, fine. It’s not like Bet didn’t have its share of tragedies before Gold Morning, it’s not like the whole  _ world, _ even absent capes, even absent aliens, wasn’t a fucking horrorshow. Rewind to before Scion showed up and people were still dying horribly for stupid, preventable reasons, beyond the capacity of our brains to even grasp any of it, and I’m supposed to be scarred because we went through something an order of magnitude worse than what came before, when that was already inconceivable?” She put the fork of strudel into her mouth. “Fuck it,” she said around a mouthful of food.

“He was our father,” said the other woman.

“No one gets to tell me how I’m supposed to feel,” said Silky.

“He was our fucking  _ father,” _ repeated the other woman, tears in her eyes.

“It’s -- it was always different for us, you always thought that family was just this, sacred, binding, thing,” said Silky. Some of the tension had left her muscles. “For me it was just people I was forced to be around. Some of those people were friends, and some of them weren’t, but for the ones that weren’t, it was just … there wasn’t a point to it, I wasn’t invested in the relationship just because of,” she waved her hands, “genetics, maybe there’s something wrong with me for thinking that, but … you know, you  _ don’t _ get to tell me how I feel, or how I should feel, and I never try to do that to you, and--”

“You don’t want to fight,” said the other woman, wiping away a tear. “You never want to fight, and then here we are.”

“You said that my life was a dead-end,” said Silky, her voice catching.

“No,” said the other woman, shaking her head. “No, no, it’s this job, this path, taking up languages, putting yourself in this fight for people who are going to get run over.”

“That’s what I’m trying to prevent,” said Silky, her voice soft. “First contact tends to go horribly for the indigenous people, you know that as well as I do, and that was the case even when the technologically and organizationally superior civilization didn’t consist of hundreds of millions of refugees trying to settle the land as quickly as possible. The whole thing is fucked already, and I’m one of the only people that’s actually trying to make a difference. And I  _ can _ make a difference, Miskwa,” finally, a name for the woman, “I’m one of the only people who has the training, and the will, and … it’s what I always dreamed of. I’m not going to feel sorry about that.”

April was a strong believer in the last word, and that seemed like it might be the place to leave it, but she held on, hoping that there was something more. She was going to have to figure out Silky’s schedule. It took some doing, to stay with someone in the long term, but maybe it would be worth it to come along for that expedition. April hadn’t even known that there  _ were _ natives on Gimel.

“They’re going to get rolled over, the native Gimellians,” said Miskwa. “Where does that leave you? Hoping that months, maybe years of studying them is going to amount to anything? A champion for a people who can’t pay you, working against a government that in the best case is going to copy the plans for the reservations we were raised in, and in the worst case is going to let them be wiped out by the villains looking for easy prey?”

“Worst case is worse than that,” said Silky. “You  _ know _ that. Extermination, indoctrination, children taken from their mothers and fathers, raised as though they were Bet natives, until there’s no trace of them left.”

“And that’s your duty,” said Miskwa. She folded her arms across her chest. “That’s the thing that it’s so important for you to do, not the actual work of rebuilding, not helping out your actual people.”

“It’s not something I feel compelled to do,” replied Silky. “It’s something that I  _ want _ to do. That’s the difference that you don’t seem to be getting. It’s not duty, it’s desire.”

April let her grip go, and returned to her room, to look at the marked up walls. In a way, she felt like Silky’s sister was talking to her directly. Of all the things that she could do with her power, she was spying on her neighbors, not for the purposes of gathering information, not to make money, not to help out the exiled denizens of Bet, but because she wanted to. It did seem a bit hollow, when she looked at it from the outside. The thought was unpleasant, and so April turned her attention to the markings on the wall, looking for an escape from that truth.


	3. Chapter 3

April couldn’t read the thoughts of her viewpoint, but she had access to the full sensorium, even the bits that people normally didn’t notice unless they were actively paying attention, and not everything that happened in the human brain stayed private from the body. She wasn’t a lie detector; to hone that skill she would probably have to have some friends to practice with. But there  _ were _ outward signs of what a person was thinking that she was acquainted with, which gave her some context beyond just what a person said or did.

Attraction was the easiest to spot; increased heart rate, butterflies in the stomach, perspiration, increased blood flow, all pretty obvious even for mild cases, and the girl that April had taken to calling Straps was emphatically not a mild case.

If she had seen Straps and Man-boobs from the outside, she would have thought that he was her sugar daddy, or that he was blackmailing her, or that he was one of the worse kinds of capes and was screwing with her head in some way.

She was sprightly, with as much bare skin as the world could handle, even when it was chilly out, short shorts and spaghetti strap tank tops, hair tied up so that even her neck was exposed. She was skinny, but in a way that was more attractive than not, and in April’s professional opinion, she should have been cold without clothing or fat to warm her, but she seemed to run hot, most of the time, and even went so far as to start up the box fan in the window of 4G when it was a brisk day out. She was pretty, in April’s opinion, though less pretty without makeup, and the effect was ruined sometimes by April’s posture, which was terrible.

Man-boobs -- she never would have called him that to his face, or even in private, or even in the little notes that she left herself about the other people in her apartment, it would have been shallow and mean, but it was how she thought of him, because that was the first thing she always noticed when she was in his body. He was overweight, but it wasn’t just that, because his breasts were bigger than his bulk would have indicated. April thought that it was probably gynecomastia, she had looked it up at the library, and she wasn’t sure whether Man-boobs knew that’s what it was or not. There was a lot to dislike about his body from the inside, and a fair amount to dislike from the inside, which, again, was shallow and mean, but also the way that April felt. She didn’t like the way he moved forward on a chair to get in a better position to lift himself up. She didn’t like sweat in weird places. She didn’t like how the skin at his sides felt stretched. She didn’t really like looking at him from the outside either, with his thinning hair and awkward stubble that was just a little too long to be a five o’clock shadow and a little too short and thin to be an actual beard.

They were in love. Well, April couldn’t really say that definitively, because she couldn’t look into their minds, but if they  _ weren’t _ in love, then they were definitely in lust. Straps would look at Man-boobs, and April could feel the attraction across every inch of skin -- some inches more than others (blegh). They kissed whenever they passed by each other, which was often, and sometimes those kisses turned into make-out sessions (double blegh), which was when April would bail out. She’d used her power in the direction of their apartment once and discovered herself in Man-boobs body while they were in the throes of passion, which made April swear off using her power for a full forty-eight hours, and swear off visiting apartment 4G for almost a week.

She kept coming back though. They both had pleasant voices, and they talked about interesting things, and in part, their attraction to each other was a mystery that April wanted to solve to her own satisfaction, and the more time she spent in their bodies, the more she thought she understood them, even if the bodies themselves were like a fire alarm going off in the next room, constantly there, constantly trying to pull away attention, able to be drowned out by something sufficiently engaging, but only momentarily. Fortunately, today was one of the good days.

“The era of cops and robbers is completely over,” said Man-boobs from his chair. His eyes were on the TV set, which was muted but with closed captions on, but his actual attention was on Straps, who was cooking in the kitchen, separated from him by what you might generously call a breakfast bar, if you were trying to dress up the apartment listing.

“You’ve said,” she replied, sliding the flat of her knife across a cutting board to scrape chopped onions into a big pot. It was going to be chili, from the looks of the canned beans and tomatoes set out on the narrow kitchen counter. “What is it this time?”

“Someone shot a cape,” replied Man-boobs. “Name of Fume Hood, but that’s not really important. There was some kind of altercation between capes, not really clear on that, but the end result was that some nobody in a crowd shot her, put her in the hospital.”

“Huh,” replied Straps, turning toward him as the onions sizzled in oil that smelled slightly rancid to April. She knit her eyebrows. As Straps looked at Man-boobs, there was an almost-familiar heightening of senses, a dilation of pupils to let in more light, an increased sensetivity of the skin, near-instant responses to some kind of reaction expanding its way through the chemical soup in Straps’ brain. “What happened to the person who shot her?”

“In custody,” said Man-boobs. “No name given, kind of wondering whether he’s safe. That’s not really the point though, it’s a sign of the times. More people with guns, because crime rates would be through the roof if anyone was actually tracking them, and because there’s all kinds of wildlife, more rural populations, no crackdowns or enforcement, broken trust with the PRT, et cetera.”

“And the inherent tension of a society that promotes vigilantism but then tells the normals to stay out of it,” Straps added, spinning her knife around in a cavalier way. She stopped briefly when one of her straps started to slip and hooked a thumb under it to push it back in place, which was a tic of hers. (April debated for a moment, then stabbed out toward Man-boobs. The switches were easier when it was brief hops, within the same area, and especially if she went back and forth at regular intervals. She heard the rest of what Straps had to say from Man-boobs perspective, the voice totally different without the resonance of being inside the body.) “Had to break at some point, especially if you look at the numbers. I actually ran across a really interesting post on PHO the other day, someone had tried to figure out what percentage of capes you could kill with a handgun. Mods made a stink about it and locked the thread, but they didn’t actually remove it.”

“You know I hate when you keep my in suspense,” replied Man-boobs with a smile. The feeling was the kind that April lived for, that kept her coming back to this couple in 4G, the way his smile reached his eyes, the way he looked away from the television toward her and she could feel the sheer  _ intent _ behind it, the warmth and love, written on his body. April switched over to Straps to receive it.

“The first estimate was 80% or something like that, but it wasn’t actually based on going through a registry and counting it out, it was -- what’s that thing they do with bugs?” Straps frowned and turned back to the onions, which were getting translucent in the hot oil.

“Bugs?” asked Man-boobs.

“Yeah, if they want to know bug populations they sort of rope off one area and then do a count in there, then figure it out backward--”

“Population sampling,” Man-boobs supplied.

“There were a bunch of disagreements about that, saying that it was dumb to do it that way, or that the OP had screwed it up somehow by picked the wrong kind of location,” continued April. “And then some people were contesting the specifics of even the sample, saying that ‘could you kill them with a handgun’ is a bad way to look at it, because capes are so dangerous, even the ones that seem like they shouldn’t be.”

“And that’s when you raised the idea of that inherent tension?” asked Man-boobs.

“Right,” replied Straps, adjusting her straps again. She reached into a drawer, which stuck slightly, and pulled out a slightly rusted can opener. The motions were nearly automatic for her, but April was briefly overcome by the feeling of Straps’ fingers bringing in new sensations. “You send twelve-year-olds up against Endbringers and then say that people shouldn’t try to shoot capes that definitely  _ will _ die to gunfire? And there are a fair number of capes who aren’t really more dangerous than someone with a handgun.”

“‘More dangerous than’ isn’t the same as ‘can be killed by’,” said Man-boobs.

“I know, I know,” replied Straps with a wave behind her as she dumped several of the cans she opened into the pot. The liquid hissed as it made contact with the flat bottom of the pot, and sent up smells that April might have salivated at, if she had been in her own body. Maybe she was salivating, back in her room, unaware of it. “But you know what I mean? The reason villains are so dangerous is that a lot of them are willing to use force. A completely normal person with a gun who decided to use force against people--”

“Wouldn’t be a normal person,” said Man-boobs.

“Eh,” replied Straps, glancing away from the stove. “These days?” Man-boobs gave a non-committal shrug from his position on the couch. “It’s one of the reasons that the end of cops and robbers is so scary.”

“You know that I’ll protect you, right?” asked Man-boobs.

Straps paused, then turned back to the meatless chili to give it a stir. Her feelings had shifted something, if her sensorium was any indication. Her muscles had gotten tense, and hairs were standing up. “You know that I love you, right?”

“I know,” he replied, his voice soft. April heard the click of a television being shut off. Straps’ eyes were still on the pot. “But you don’t think that I’ll protect you.”

“I think that you would try,” she replied. “But … if Murderbeam goes walking by this apartment and just fires a beam up toward us because he’s fucked in the head by his passenger, we’re dead. If the Heartbroken come here and try to take us over, they take us over, no contest. Killer plagues, robot hordes -- I almost wish that the Endbringers were back, because they were at least a threat to unite against, and--”

He wrapped his arms around her from behind. “Cops and robbers is over, that era is in the past, but that doesn’t mean that it’s doom and gloom. There was a reason that the PRT didn’t use lethal force, and the Endbringers? They were that reason. Maybe Scion too, if they knew about him, but he’s dead as a doornail. We don’t  _ need _ capes like we used to. We can kill the ones that don’t step in line. We can kill them all, if we have to.”

“There are still threats,” replied Straps, but she leaned back against him, sighing somewhat and closing her eyes, leaving April in darkness, with just the smell of chili mixed with the smell of their apartment, and a hint of their body odor, the taste of a mouth with nothing in it, hands touching hands, fabric on skin--

April came out of it, back into her own apartment, and sat there staring at the wall for a few moments. They were talking about murder, casually. Not that they would personally kill anyone, just that they might hope it happens, that it would be better for a parahuman to be dead than alive, all else being equal.

April swallowed. She was thirsty; she hadn’t had any water since she’d come home, and she’d ignored her thirst when hopping between viewpoints, which was always a mistake. She drank from a plastic bottle that was so thin it crinkled in her hand just from the pressure of her touch. She hated being in her own body sometimes, the muted sensations of it, the way she had to be active instead of just sitting back and watching what other people were doing. It was like being in class, zoning out, and having the teacher call on you, but it was  _ just _ that, all the time.

She had read enough to know that having powers came with a cost, even if they were all upsides. Capes couldn’t stay still, not for long, they couldn’t be productive, not without butting heads, teams fell apart if they got bigger than four people, and even three was sometimes a problem, even  _ two  _ would eventually be at each other’s throats, depending on who you asked. April knew that she had a passenger, sitting back there, watching what she was doing, manipulating her, nudging her, just little enough so that she wouldn’t be able to use that as an excuse, just enough to fuck her up if she didn’t get with the program. She touched the back of her head, sticking her fingers into her hair, and hating the way her brain seemed to decide that it was unimportant, a sensory detail that just got edited away.

“We’re going to have to come to some kind of agreement, you and I,” said April to her passenger. “Maybe not today, but someday soon. Some way we can both get what we want.”


End file.
